produce what they want," she said.

BAH developed methodologies to help users represent what they want and modeling techniques to help IT people explain what they've heard.

"We ask IT to establish a model with an implementation-agnostic view," Portman said, meaning that IT should be able to draw up a definition of the business requirements that is not tainted by a predetermined view of which tools to use.

Portman recalled a 2007 engagement at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was going though a rocky implementation of an Oracle enterprise resource planning system to streamline and automate purchasing and warehouse management. After interviewing users, BAH consultants believed the deployment had been driven too much by the technology team, so when the system was rolled out, NIH experienced unanticipated problems, such as backlogs and data conversion issues from previous systems.

"We don't bring in IT guys; we bring in an operations team with supply-chain management experience," Portman said. The team meets with stakeholders and managers to dig for the root causes and to hammer out solutions, which may include more software training for users. Portman said some large IT projects go off the rails if midcourse corrections aren't made. It can help to bring in an impartial third party to review assumptions about whether the software is matching up with business processes. "When you are working so closely on a project," she said, "you can be guilty of drinking your own bathwater."

A similar financial software change forced Kim Heldman, CIO of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), to make organizational changes last year.

CDOT began an SAP implementation in summer 2005 and went live in November 2006. Heldman said that soon after she took the CIO post in April 2007, "it was evident that we didn't have the best support structure going forward considering what a big change this had been."

She brought in consultants to analyze business processes and research best practices. "We decided to create a business process resource center in tandem with our technology resource center," Heldman explained. The center is staffed with 12 business process experts who bridge the gap between business users and IT. For instance, one person might have specific knowledge of how CDOT does accounting and how that applies to SAP. They meet with the IT team on a regular basis to determine priorities.

With the heavy lifting on the SAP implementation completed, Heldman is hoping to turn that project's steering committee into a broader IT management team to guide overall policy and foster integrated IT planning.

Emphasis on Governance
Toni Jelinek knew she was facing alignment problems three years ago when she took the CIO position in Hennepin County, Minnesota's most populous county. Minneapolis is the county seat.

"We had a centralized IT organization to serve the whole county," she said, "yet the departments had set up their own internal IT shops because they weren't getting what they wanted from centralized IT."

The first thing she did was begin a strategic planning process because she realized a renewed emphasis on governance was necessary. "We didn't address technology so much as how we want to run IT."

IT and departmental business leaders decided that centralized IT would become a shared services department that provides common functionality to all agencies; IT staff embedded in departments would stay there, led by project leaders called "business information officers" who report to the business line and Jelinek.

The business information officers also sit on a newly established technology steering committee, but Jelinek admitted that process still needs refinement. "Originally I had envisioned one big happy family all working together, but it's taking some time to get there," she said. "We have people talking to each other about projects, but we also